By Nalini Bikkina, FDP 2012
Caption: Author with her parents
I am fortunate to have had mentors who transformed the way I think, work, live and relate to people around. ‘Simple living and high thinking’ did not seem just an adage as I saw several of my mentors including renowned Indian editor and journalist Palagummi Sainath, an ardent administrator turned politician and the founder of Lok Satta, Jayaprakash Narayan and Social Medicine and Mental Health expert Prof Vikram Patel, practise it. Despite being luminaries, they have always been unassuming with an unapologetic commitment to what they believe in. They exemplified to me that sense shines with double lustre when set in humility.
My grandparents imparted the values of kindness and generosity. Despite financial difficulties, my grandfather, being one of the first engineering graduates and one among the earliest migrants to the city of Visakhapatnam from a village in the adjacent East Godavari district, mentored and supported the education of a bunch of his relatives. My parents taught us the significance of honesty, sincerity and integrity. Heading a hospital, my father was an honest doctor and an ardent administrator who did not leverage his position for undue gains in cash, kind or favours and did not allow anyone else under his watch to do so; even when all of this meant financial hardship in a general environment of selfishness, parochialism and deceit.
Caption: Author with Indian editor and journalist P. Sainath
My teachers believed in me more than I believed in myself. They stood by me, basking in my accomplishments and being my bulwarks when I was vulnerable. I need to specially mention my Ph.D. supervisor Prof. Vindhya who nudged me to apply for a doctoral fellowship despite my self-doubts. She pushed me into several challenging teaching assignments very early on and built confidence in me as a teacher. My project supervisors Prof. Rama Mohana Turaga and Prof. Vaibhav Bhamoriya trusted my work enough to actually fill in for a gap in data by going to the field themselves. I also truly believe that Prof. Rama Mohana Turaga’s letter of recommendation was a crucial parameter among others, in getting me the Fulbright Fellowship. An eleventh hour requirement for a letter of recommendation was fulfilled because he took out time despite a demanding schedule at his end.
Caption: Author with her Phd Supervisor Prof Vidhya
One of the greatest teachers I have ever met imbibed the philosophy that there is a cost to quality and no limit to efficiency, that excellence is a habit and that good teaching cannot be reduced to technique was IIMA’s Prof. Saral Mukherjee, the one and only master who can build a strategic operations session to a crescendo with Beethoven’s ninth symphony, Ode to Joy. As a teacher myself this profound message with embedded lessons for life touched a chord!
Caption: Author with Prof Patrick McNamara
My Fulbright Associate in the United States, Prof. Patrick McNamara has been an immense source of strength throughout my work in that country and was more of a friend than a reporting officer. In dire situations when I had no one else to help me in an alien land, Patrick has always been my go to person who would wave his magic wand and things would fall in place. Lance Morgan, the superstar CEO of a tribal corporation, had been a tremendous source of inspiration. I learnt from Lance more than I hoped to do so during my fellowship. What I noticed about him is a near total lack of hypocrisy, which is an almost endangered attribute especially among the rich and the powerful. A driven visionary who has time for work and family and nothing much beyond, he transformed the destiny of his people, and keeps constantly pushing his boundaries and the limits of his tribe to scale new heights of progress.
Some of my mentors taught me that there are causes in life more worthy than the pettiness of others around. A dear senior colleague at work cautioned me not to fall from grace no matter how many curve balls life throws at me and to let my work be my voice. Several of my beloved friends got me to decipher the very thin line between love, perseverance and desperation. After all these years, through accomplishments and setbacks, these teachers, guides and friends have been my beacons who helped me comprehend that life has a commitment beyond the self, that there is wisdom beyond knowledge, that there is purity of purpose beyond fame and that there is integrity beyond success.
I will fail in my duty if I do not acknowledge another set of people who taught me what not to be in life – arrogant, self-obsessed, nepotistic, credulous, deceitful, self-piteous, ungrateful, whining, free-riding and jobless. I have always invested emotionally in professional-personal relationships, walked the extra mile even when it wasn’t necessary and exceeded my brief in good faith, despite being repeatedly cautioned. I am also grateful to those in this context who left me maligned, to those who have been ‘close confidants’ but did not want so much as to see me in the eye after I stepped away from a leadership position. They helped me draw my professional boundaries clearly, in freeing up my bandwidth substantially and in becoming hyper focused on my work.
Mentors come in all forms – parents, teachers, bosses, friends, philosophers, supervisors, colleagues and even public figures who inspire through the way they lead their lives. Lessons for life from these mentors too come in several hues – love, protectiveness, inspiration, advice, friendship, criticism, chiding, avoidance, hatred, betrayal and sometimes, plain silence. To me, it seems, we can learn and continue to be inspired only if we take all these precepts in our stride. Standing at crossroads today, holding on dearly to my old school values in an ecosystem that encourages otherwise, I celebrate my mentors, value their life lessons and count them among my blessings, as Albert Einstein said, “Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted.”
Nalini Bikkina is Professor of Psychology at GITAM School of Humanities and Social Sciences.
